1.10.6. Licensing

Some of the products from CODESYS GmbH with costs, which are downloaded to and used on the PLC need to be licensed for this PLC.

Examples for licensed products are:

  • CANopen Master / -Slave

  • Modbus Master / -Slave

  • HMI

  • Softmotion

  • …

There are a few possible ways to get such a license for your PLC.

1.10.6.1. Derivate based licensing

To be able to use licensed CODESYS products, like fieldbusses and libraries, on your PLC, you need to have a valid license file called “3S.dat” for your PLC. This file is (by default) fixely bound to on target derivate. The informations that are checked are the following:

  • Operating System

  • CPU Type

  • Vendor ID

  • Target ID

  • Device Type

If those values are correct, the licenses which are contained in the license file “3S.dat”, can be used on this PLC.

If those values are not correct, none of the licensed products can be used on this PLC.

If the file is available, but doesn’t contain the requested license, the corresponding product will run in demo mode. The demo period for most products is around 30min.

If the license file is missing completely there are two ways to react on that:

  1. If the compile flag LICENSE_THROWEXCEPTION is set for the application, the PLC will switch to an exception state after loading this application.

  1. If the compile flag LICENSE_THROWEXCEPTION is not set for the application, the product will not be licensed, an error will be logged but the application will still be able to run.

To set this compiler flag flag automatically, you may want to add it to your device description to the following section:

<DeviceDescription>
<Device>
  <ExtendedSettings>
    <ts:TargetSettings>
      <ts:section name="codegenerator">
        <ts:setting name="compiler-defines">
           <ts:value>LICENSE\_THROWEXCEPTION</ts:value>